Florian Daguet Bresson - Fondateur de Ceramics Now

Art in Ceramics!

Presented by Florian Daguet-Bresson, this exhibition highlights the diversity and vivacity of a practice in full renaissance, the art of ceramics.

By exhibiting the best of contemporary ceramic art, through the creations of artists who, through their strength, their genius, their freedom and sometimes their humour, give birth to the artistic perceptions and values of today.

In recent years, the new techniques used by artists have given rise to an aesthetic revolution that has reawakened the discipline. We are at a turning point in the history of this art form, which now reaches a wider audience.

New collections were formed in response to the influx of these new forms and materials, resulting from studies in chemical physics, 3D printing creations, a return to traditional techniques and the evolution of artistic approaches.

Ceramic art today

The skills explored by the artists are borderless, free and rethought to create new forms of expression.

In the first edition, the landscape is eclectic and baroque, reflecting an eccentricity that ceramic artifice allows. From the wood-fired kiln, with the ancestral Japanese technique of anagama practiced by the French artist Simon Manohato the new 3D printing techniques mischievously mastered by New York artist Jolie Ngo, as well as the neo-Sottsassian spirit of the artist Alice Gavalet or the spiritual and committed sculpture of Johan Creten, it is each time a new encounter specific to each artist between, on the one hand, their imagination and, on the other hand, the constraints of the production.

We are in a phase where the discipline is undergoing aesthetic upheavals due to the arrival of new techniques, scientific discoveries, new materials and knowledge, it is the announcement of a new era which, I am sure, will leave some of today's great names in the history of art.

For a long time, at least in the West, ceramics was confined to a decorative craft, but in the 20th century it gradually gained the status of a major art form, assimilated to a form of sculpture, thanks in particular to the productions of a Picasso or a Fontana. The profile of these two artists as ceramists has gained recognition to the point that their value on the contemporary art market has risen dramatically. Contemporary ceramics are attracting a new public, which is mixing with the old collectors.

In recent years, this very plastic and precious medium has been (re)discovered, stimulated by the development of new techniques, stemming from chemistry and computer-assisted creation. Shapes are emerging that would be unthinkable without scientific innovations. Technological and aesthetic revolutions create a desire for new collections. In this context, foundations, museums and other cultural institutions are very interested in the reinvention of ceramics.

Ceramics is delighting and reviving the art market today. Ceramics Now is a testimony to this new vitality.

Foreword of Ceramics Now 2021

written by Norman Rosenthal

The world of art is about looking back and looking forward in time. Arguably no flexible art form has quite the perfect potential for surviving into the infinity of time as baked clay-in other words the infinitely rich through all human history art of ceramics, and later when it came to be invented in China, and then by theft came to Europe, the fine related arts of porcelain. Yes of course there are the metallic arts of gold and bronze, not to mention stone, but fired clay has the unique ability to take and hold onto colour and never fade in any way. In the ancient world there were certainly as many paintings on a flat grounds such as wood or woven materials as there are in our own recent time spans, but of those as good as nothing survives, apart from some miraculously preserved frescoes and the funerary portraits of Fayum.

However there are, whether it is that to the East or West that we look, countless pots and other ceramic forms from every era that have survived without the slightest perceptual change, other than through breakage. The paintings, in the Louvre even by the greatest old masters, do not look exactly as they were when they left the studio, sometimes far from it -the chemistry of colour materials used causes them to change irrevocably. But the Sevres vase or drinking vessel, whether of the eighteenth century, or from the epoch of Art Nouveau, what we can see and love, is exactly as to those who first saw each piece, in all its intense and subtle colour and shape. And even if there is not quite the same sense of fetish that surrounds the name of individual artists that exists about the arts of Western painting and sculpture, the potential in ceramics for self-critical yet playful or deadly serious beauty exists in every age. This includes naturally, perhaps surprisingly for some persons and who might be inclined to declare the arts of ceramics “dead”, equally in our very own times.

For this exhibition, Florian Daguet-Bresson have assembled for us a remarkable collection of contemporary ceramics from all over the world that too speak of the endless imaginative thrills of colour combined with form. These too now be inevitably preserved in perpetuity thanks to various and complex firing methods – each the precise legitimate secret of the artist. These mysteries enable extraordinary shapes and subjects to come into being, and, each expressing the unique imagination and fantasy of each artist, who is also equally of course a highly skilled craftsperson. We are able see and have around us, in almost beyond real and intense colour, fantasy architectural model structures, forever burning candles, vases of flowers that will never die, softly coloured tissues in piles that will never soil, mysterious figures and faces. Humour and reflection is everywhere. Above everything there are riots of colour, pattern and original surface invention that like the ceramics of old intended to be taken to an afterlife somewhere or other, that too will all survive, if looked after and enjoyed with care, exactly as they are into something close to eternity.

Sir Norman Rosenthal pour Ceramics Now 2021

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